The Heat of the Moon: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries)

by Parshall, Sandra

  With blood-slick fingers I punched 911. The instant I heard a voice I shouted, “My mother tried to kill herself! She’s bleeding to death!”

  The woman at the other end started to speak, but I dropped the receiver, let it bounce on its cord and clank against the wall. I ran back to Mother and fell to my knees on the bloody tile.

  “Please, please don’t die,” I begged. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. Mother, I love you, please don’t die.”

  Her eyes met mine for an instant before her lids fluttered and closed. Her breathing slowed, her body relaxed. Her face had gone stark white but it was peaceful now, as if she were drifting into deep sleep.

  The faint sound of a siren dragged me to my feet. Suddenly weak and dizzy, I had to lean on walls and furniture to get to the front door.

  The next minutes were a blur of noise and bustle. One medic worked over Mother, another forced me into a chair while he wrapped my wound. I was drenched with blood. I strained to get to Mother but the medic held me back. He kept asking, What happened? What happened? Somewhere in the room my sister was crying.

  After Mother had been rolled out, the medic told me to lie down on another stretcher. Luke was back, leaning over me. I reached for him.

  He kissed my uninjured hand and laid it back on my chest. A smudge of blood was left behind at the corner of his mouth. “I’ll be at the hospital,” he said. “I’ll come right behind.”

  In the closed alcohol-reeking ambulance, with the keening siren deafening me to all other sound, I forced myself to turn my head and look at the stretcher next to mine.

  The medic bent over her, blocking her upper body from my sight. As I watched, he sat back, shoulders slumping. He remained that way for a moment with his head bowed. Then he shifted and I caught a glimpse of her pale cheek before he drew the blood-soaked sheet up over her face.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Wrapped in warmth, I drifted toward wakefulness, my senses switching on one by one. A dry sour taste in my mouth. The smell of disinfectant and alcohol. A murmur of voices nearby. Blinding light that made me squeeze my eyes shut again after one quick blink.

  And pain. A deep throb that seemed to pulse toward me from a great distance, washing over me in waves.

  “Rachel?” a female voice said.

  I opened my eyes again, just a slit, and saw a sharp-featured young woman with black hair.

  She peered into my face. “You’re in the hospital, Rachel. You had surgery on your arm.”

  Mother.

  The full force of memory hit me. I cried out.

  “Just try to lie still,” the nurse said. “Just rest.”

  Mother’s dead.

  I opened my eyes wide, staring around at half a dozen empty beds, a big central desk with a young woman behind it, a silent television set that flashed images in a corner.

  “Would you like to see your fiancé?” the nurse said. “I can’t let him stay more than a minute, but he’s been waiting all this time and he wants to see you.”

  Fiancé? Bewildered, I didn’t answer.

  The nurse moved away, her shoes slapping against the floor.

  My left arm felt heavy and stiff. I looked down in faint surprise: my forearm was encased in a cast and my hand was thickly bandaged, the bluish fingers sticking out from layers of white. The source of the pain.

  In my mind I saw a flash of steel and Mother’s tormented face.

  The nurse reappeared with Luke at her side. “We’re about to take her upstairs to a room for the night,” she told him. “So I can’t let you stay long.”

  He leaned to kiss my cheek and whispered against my ear, “In case you haven’t heard, we’re engaged. I had to say that to get in to see you.”

  For a moment the warm, sweet smell of him replaced the sharp hospital odors.

  “Mother?” I whispered.

  “Shh. Don’t think about that now.” He stroked hair off my cheek. “I want you to come home with me when they release you. I’ll be here first thing in the morning.”

  Where was my sister? Where was Mother? What had they done with her?

  Luke kissed me and was gone. The nurse seemed to be adding something to my IV. As she and another woman rolled my bed down a hallway, I lapsed into sleep again.

  ***

  When I woke the next morning Michelle was hanging clothes in a small corner closet. The bed next to mine lay empty, made up.

  “Mish?” I said, the word thick and toneless. I pushed hair off my face and rubbed at my eyes, fighting off grogginess. An IV needle was taped to my hand, and with every movement I dragged the long IV tube back and forth over the sheet. It made little slipping sounds.

  “You’re awake,” Michelle announced. She faced me, her body stiff and straight, hands locked before her in a tight grip. “I brought you some clean clothes.”

  Memory rushed back and I moaned under the assault. “Mother—”

  “They’re doing all kinds of tests on—on her body.” Michelle broke off and ducked her head, but I’d already seen the tears glittering along her lashes. “We have to wait for them to finish before we can schedule the funeral.”

  “Funeral,” I repeated, stunned by the meaning of the word.

  “I’ll make the arrangements. I’m sure you don’t want to be bothered with any of it.”

  “Mish,” I said, “please don’t talk to me this way.”

  She stared past me, toward the window, and was silent for a moment. In the glare of morning sun she looked haggard, exhausted. When she spoke her tone had softened. “You need to rest and get better. You’ve got some damaged muscle in your arm. You’ll be in the cast for three weeks, then you’ll need physical therapy, but they say you won’t lose mobility.”

  I nodded, biting my lip. I wished my sister would come to me, put her arms around me.

  “I called your friend Damian last night,” she said, “and asked him to go get your animals. He did it right away. So you don’t have to worry about them.”

  “Thank you.” Where, I wondered, were her strength and clear-headedness coming from? Did she have a reserve that I’d never suspected?

  She stepped closer and said, “The police were at the house most of the night.”

  “The police?”

  “They said they have to investigate any violent death. And a knife wound.” Her gaze flitted to my arm and away again. “They went over every inch of the kitchen and bathroom.”

  Alarmed, I struggled to push myself up. “The newspaper story—”

  “I took it.” Her gaze wandered the room, avoiding my eyes. “They never saw it.”

  I slumped back against the pillow, breathless, mind racing over all the possible consequences of the police finding the story about Michael and Michelle Goddard’s deaths twenty-two years ago.

  She looked at me curiously. “Did you want them to see it? Are you going to tell them about—all that?”

  “Of course not.”

  Her shoulders slumped with relief and she bowed her head. Then she straightened again, chin up. “They questioned me for a long time, and they’ll be asking you questions too. We have to tell them the same story if we don’t want it all to come out. You need to back up what I told them.”

  This was so bizarre I could hardly take it in. Getting our stories straight. Working out what to say to the cops. Good God. “What did you tell them?”

  My sister astonished me with the intricately shaded and detailed mix of truth and fiction she’d concocted for the police. Mother had been suffering from depression. This wasn’t surprising, because it ran in her family; both her own parents had committed suicide. Michelle and I couldn’t persuade her to go into a clinic for treatment. Mother resisted the idea that she was following the same sad path as her parents, and believed she could work out her problems alone.

  On the night before, Mother had been uncommunicative, Michelle told the police. We couldn’t coax her to talk. We’d been horrified when she suddenly grabbed the carving knife and started out of
the kitchen. I was cut accidentally when I tried to take the knife from her. She locked herself in the bathroom, and by the time we got the door open she’d slashed her wrists. She slit her throat before we could stop her.

  When Michelle finished we were both silent for a long time. I looked down at my cast and bandage, remembering the moment when I realized Mother meant to kill me.

  From the hallway came a rumble and the faint clink of metal on metal: the breakfast trolley.

  “Most of it’s true,” Michelle said at last. “Will you tell them the same thing?”

  I nodded.

  “Good.” She picked up her purse from a chair as if to leave.

  “Did you read the story?” I said.

  Her face was closed, cold. “No. I tore it up. I flushed it down the toilet in the restroom outside the ER.”

  I closed my eyes over burning tears. “Mish,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry. Mother—If I hadn’t—”

  “Don’t start,” she said. “Just don’t start. I don’t want to hear how sorry you are.”

  The door hinge creaked, and a young blond nurse poked her head in. “Luke Campbell’s here,” she said. “You want him to come on in, or do you want him to wait a little bit?”

  “Tell him to go away,” Michelle said.

  “No!” I said. “Tell him to come in, please.”

  “You don’t need visitors—”

  “I’m going home with him, Mish.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  Watching her severe expression crumble into hurt and dismay, I wavered, but only for a second. The nurse waited for clear instructions. “Tell him to come in,” I said.

  “Rachel—” Michelle broke off when Luke appeared in the doorway.

  “I’m sorry, Mish.” I was deserting her when she needed me most, but there was no other way I could get through the coming days. “I can’t go back to the house.”

  She glared at Luke with a hatred so raw it took my breath away. She spun and rushed out of the room.

  Luke came to the bed and closed his arms around me. Too weary to cry, I let sorrow and guilt fill me to overflowing, strangle me, drown me, then I felt it all drain away, leaving me empty and cold.

  ***

  By mid-afternoon a police detective was at Luke’s apartment to question me. His name was John Rodriguez and he was about Luke’s age, with very short black hair and an intensity and attentiveness that kept him always leaning forward, missing nothing.

  I sat on the couch and answered the detective’s questions dully, trying to dissociate myself from the words and black out the images they called up, suppressing the urge to scream that rose inside me like a living thing fighting for release.

  “Mother was under a lot of stress in the last few weeks,” I said. “She’d developed heart disease and we’d all been worried about it.”

  “Would you say she was depressed?” Rodriguez asked. His dark brown eyes were locked on my face.

  “Yes. She wasn’t herself. My sister’s studying psychology, she can describe Mother’s condition better than I can.” I shook my head. “I never expected anything like this.”

  He led me over the events of that night again and again, approaching it from a different angle each time. Hoping to trip me up. My story never altered.

  “She wouldn’t talk to us. We couldn’t get through to her. She grabbed the knife and I tried to get it away from Mother and that’s how I got cut. I was so surprised, and it hurt so much, I let go of Mother. She ran into the bathroom. I had to jimmy open the door. She’d already cut her wrists. She was bleeding—”

  I stopped to suck in a deep breath. Tears ran down my cheeks, silent, unstoppable. “My sister was still out in the hall, I think. That’s when Mother—she cut her throat.”

  I swiped at my wet face with the back of my hand. Rodriguez watched me for a moment, then scribbled in his little notebook.

  “Did you get along with your mother?” His voice was quiet, almost soothing, encouraging confession. So much like Mother’s. “You have any differences of opinion? Most mothers and daughters do, don’t they? It’s only natural.”

  “We got along.”

  “Kind of unusual, isn’t it, two grown daughters living with their mother?”

  “My sister’s a student, and I’m just starting out in my work. It made sense for us to live at home. Besides, I missed my family when I was away at school. I was glad to be home again.”

  “You stand to inherit a good bit, don’t you? You and your sister’ll be pretty well-off.”

  What did he think? That we were the female version of the Menendez brothers, butchering our mother for her money?

  Yes, I realized with a jolt, that was what he thought. In my fear that revelations about kidnapping and a lifetime of lies would be dragged into the open, I’d forgotten how Mother’s death and my injury must look to the police.

  I couldn’t let him see the turn my thoughts had taken.

  “Detective Rodriguez,” I said, looking him directly in the eyes and trying to keep my voice level, “if I had the choice between an inheritance and my mother’s life, I think on the whole I’d rather have my mother back.”

  ***

  Over the next few days the detective came to see me twice more. I guessed from his attitude that he wasn’t satisfied with the story Michelle and I told him, that he sensed something bigger swimming below the surface. A shiver ran through me when I considered what he might learn if he dug into the distant past. But he would need a reason to do that, and I was careful not to give him one. I spoke only of recent events in our lives, and when the detective asked about my father I replied indifferently that I couldn’t really remember him.

  ***

  The reporter on the evening news was tall, blond, perfectly made up. She stood in the street where we had lived, and the camera was angled to show part of the house behind her, as much as could be seen past the tall screen of yews. At the end of the driveway someone had placed a wooden sawhorse with a NO TRESPASSING sign attached.

  I sat forward on the couch, listening.

  “Inside this home in an exclusive section of McLean, a tragedy unfolded…” The reporter went on mouthing words that disguised her lack of knowledge.

  The press was playing up the story for all it was worth—prominent psychologist cuts her own throat while daughters try to wrest the knife from her—but neither Michelle nor I made statements or gave interviews, and without our cooperation little personal information had surfaced. Stories appeared about Mother’s practice, filled with statements of dismay and sadness from her colleagues. A couple of neighbors said we’d always seemed like a close family.

  I felt a shock each time I saw our names in print and heard them spoken by strangers on the TV news. How ironic it was, I thought, that Mother, so private, hiding so much, was the subject of all this publicity. Yet even in death she concealed the truth. These people who wrote about us and spoke sententiously about our tragedy on television had no idea what a story they were missing.

  I heard Luke unlocking the door, coming home from work. I rose and switched off the television set just as a photo of Mother flashed on the screen.

  I was conscious of Luke lurking at the very edge of the boundary he’d set for himself, giving me space and privacy and freedom from pressure, but always watching for signs that I needed him. In fits and starts, I told him about the old newspaper story I’d found and what really happened the night Mother died. He nodded, silently agreeing to join Michelle and me in our conspiracy to hide the truth.

  He was questioned because he’d come into the house while the medics were on the scene. He told the detective he knew nothing about Dr. Goddard’s mental state or her reasons for wanting to take her own life. His first visit to the house that night remained a secret between Luke, myself, and my sister.

  ***

  On the telephone I asked Michelle to come see me. She coldly refused. Rosario, who brought clothes to me at Luke’s apartment two days after Mother�
�s death, told me Michelle was obsessed with erasing all traces of blood from the kitchen and bathroom.

  I sat on Luke’s bed while Rosario hung my blouses and slacks in the closet.

  “I washed the walls,” she said. Tears filled her eyes. “I thought I had cleaned them well—”

  “Oh, Rosie,” I said. “I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t have had to do that.”

  She pressed her lips together and took a moment to compose herself, blinking away the tears. “But your sister wasn’t satisfied. Already this morning is a man come, taking off the old, putting up new.” Her arms swung up and down in imitation of a paperhanger.

  I saw blood-spotted wallpaper and quickly shoved the image out of my mind.

  She closed the closet door. “And the floor, the tiles—what is in between?”

  “The grout.” Blood soaking in, the stain spreading.

  “A man come and take it out, dig it out. The kitchen and the bathroom, is all broke up. Two men working same time, walls and the floors, they bump into each other.” She shook her head. “I got out of the way.”

  Her eyes, puffy from tears already shed, filled again. She pressed a hand to her mouth. I rose and went to slip my free arm around her shoulders, and for a moment we leaned into one another, my chin resting on the top of her head.

  “She was good to me, your mother,” Rosario said, wiping at her nose with a handkerchief she’d pulled from her dress pocket.

  I guided her to the bed and we sat down together.

  “Your mother was not—” She searched for a word. “—warm, but she was good to me.”

  She gave up her struggle against tears then. I stayed beside her, silent, while she wept.

  ***

  Theo, too, came to see me and pour out his sorrow. I wasn’t sure I would ever tell him the truth. Maybe someday, when I knew all of it myself. But not now.

  I was waiting. Waiting for the police to be finished with me, and for Mother to be laid to rest. When I thought of her, a swell of grief and rage and desperation rose in me, and I had to fight to subdue it and regain my equilibrium. I tried not to consider what I would do next, where my search would take me. Getting through each day took all my strength.